Hey guys like the title says im looking to purchase a copy of microsoft office for my macbook air i5 that is yet to arrive. My wife will be using it for school, and like me has never used a mac since we were kids, so looking for something close to the windows version.

Hey guys like the title says im looking to purchase a copy of microsoft office for my macbook air i5 that is yet to arrive. My wife will be using it for school, and like me has never used a mac since we were kids, so looking for something close to the windows version.

Thanks

In my humble opinion, the Windows version of Office sucks. Unfortunately, Office also has compatibility issues among its siblings. These issues do not arise so much among documents shared among colleagues at school as they do with Government forms distributed as macro-enabled Office files.

I'm betting dollars to donuts that your wife is not required to complete Government forms as macro-enabled Office files. If this is the case, then buy Office 2011. This is the most recent OS X version of Office. If your wife is an instructor, then this version will handle all Office files that her student submit to her. If she is a student, then this version will handle all Office files that her professors distribute to their classes.

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Office for Mac 2011 doesn't get even close to Office 2010. It only comes in few languages, the spelling checker is awful, outlook cannot connect to several exchange servers, using specific filters, no delivery or reading receipts (a lot of people use them), just to name a few.

I use Office 2010 in a VM and it's far better.

Stiil, Office for Mac 2011 is the closest version to Office 2010.

With the arrival of Office 2013, let's hope for a new edition of Office for Mac (2014?) to adress these and other issues, and make it as good as the Windows version.
When that happens, I'll go for it.

BEST? Pages,Numbers,Keynote. The Mac version of the Office Suite really is horrible. It is also different enough to the windows version that you will be learning something new anyway, why not learn Mac specific programs?

Yes, it will be a little bit of a learning curve ( anything causes you trouble, just google it, it surely has caused the other millions of windows users the same trouble and probably well documented ). Once you start playing around with cloud storage, you will be hooked. I work on documents at work, save them, work on them at home without any thumb drives or emaily stuffy, stuff. I also work on them on my iPad when that is more convenient. All my documents are available and changes or updates are instantly available to all devices.

Also consider LibreOffice.org, which is a free alternative office suite. It's not going to be as full featured MS Office, but it works fine for simple documents and usually does a good job of reading other formats (.doc, etc...)

LibreOffice branched from OpenOffice.org a while ago when Oracle bought Sun. OpenOffice is still available, but it's under Oracle's control and may not always be free.

There is also NeoOffice, which branched from openOffice long ago to provide a native Mac version of the suite.

Anyway, all of the above are free and perfectly capable of handling any school work that doesn't specify a specific package.